Cascade Cohousing is Australia's first cohousing community, and was featured as the house of 1991 in the Hobart City Council's book "100 Hobart Houses" published in 2001. The goal of Cascade Cohousing in 1991 was "To design and build a cohousing community in Hobart which will engender in residents a strong sense of community, reduce residents' impact on the environment, respect the autonomy of the individual and provide privacy."

Twenty one years on, Cascade Cohousing is celebrating meeting these goals and more importantly being a vibrant neighbourly community. Cascade Cohousing has become a national example of the potential of the cohousing model for Australian residential development and attracts regular interest from interstate media, national academics and groups interested in building cohouses. In the United States over the same period the cohousing model has been a huge success with some 200 cohouses built and the cohousing model being seen as an exciting and viable model for elders in the community. The US success suggests the potential of cohousing to significantly contribute to the future housing mix in Australia.

Many houses at Cascade Cohousing incorporate physical sustainability elements including passive solar design, solar hot water and PV, wildlife friendly native plantings, construction with second hand and low impact materials and much more. The nature of a cohousing community facilitates the sharing of resources from cars to washing machines and our community centre is a great example of a successfully shared building which enables private houses to be small.

Cascade's structures and systems for good governance, community creation and conflict resolution demonstrate the workability of consensual processes on this sized community.

The success of Cascade Cohousing owes much to the support received from friends, providers of professional services, the Hobart City Council and local residents and we want to say thank you to this broad community of support with an open day. The open day will also be of interest to Hobart residents and professionals who are interested in a new residential housing option which emphasises both sustainability and community.

You are invited to see first-hand the workings of a successful cohousing community.

Our community house will be open to visitors from 1:00 pm to 3:00 pm on Sunday April 15th and we will offer very short talks about the development and operation of Cascade Cohousing between 1:15 pm and 2:15 pm and also tours of the site and some private houses.

We suggest arriving about 12:45 pm in Saunders Crescent to allow time for parking and walking to Cascade Cohousing at number 12 (twelve). We will be unable to accept visitors arriving after 2:45 pm.

When parking in Saunders Crescent please be respectful of other residents and Metro bus drivers and avoid bus stops (there are no lines marked on the street) and park only on the outside of the curve of the Crescent, that is, on the side with even numbers.

Please like our facebook event or forward let your friends know about this page if you would like to let your friends and colleagues know of this opportunity